I hate to miss an opportunity to share a bit of knowledge, however belated, on what I learned at last October’s SharePoint User Conference. Ok, so I’ve been busy!

If you’ve followed Siteworx for any amount of time, you’ll know that we’re Microsoft Gold Certified Partners, which is not so unique but still an accomplishment given the depth of other technical talent we have in-house. I was one of the first in the company to make my way to the annual conference after we achieved our certification. Contrary to the long-running ad campaign, I actually brought a few things back with me from Vegas.

The conference included many Microsoft/Partner-led sessions on SharePoint 2010 topics, such as Content Management, Custom Branding, Social Sites, FAST Search for SharePoint, and Security. Throughout this post, I’m focusing on the new and improved Sharepoint 2010 Content Management features.

New UI customizations

Application pages (_layouts) use a dynamic master page based on what site they’re accessed from


Ribbons — a major investment in 2010


Contextual tab model


Improved Architecture

• Asynchronous JavaScript & XML
• Server or client-rendered
• CSS layout — No more tables
• Theme Markup

Authoring

Rich Authoring


Standards Support


Silverlight and Media Web parts


Digital media assets library


Metadata  management


Social site (MySites)

New enterprise wiki template and wiki Page

Improved, fewer clicks


Ratings control on the wiki page


Image uploading software

Content query web part

Customize fields are now in the GUI and no longer require XSLT.

Controlled publishing & insight

 
Workflows

• Improved SharePoint Designer enhanced workflows by adding reusable and site workflows
• Import from Visio and Export to Visio – great feature for business users to design workflows
• Integration between Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer workflows

Insight

• Improved traffic analytics
• Improved  search analytics
• Social ratings and tagging
• Health monitoring and developer dashboard

Content deployment

Reliability

• Improved operation during authoring activities

Diagnose Problems 

• Improved Information necessary to troubleshoot problems easier

Optimization (Search)

SEO

• Semantic SharePoint URL’s

Web Analytics

• New Reports and scheduled alerts
• Customized results
• New Web Part ( What’s Popular)

Now that I’ve given you a run down of some of the new Sharepoint features, here’s a real-life example of a recent Sharepoint customization we completed for one of our nonprofit clients.

For many membership-based organizations, particularly for trade associations, allowing fast, easy access to a location-based membership search is a high priority.

For this project, we created a platform that allows the public to search for members of an organization by name and/or address within a specific radius. The objective was to present the results in a list view with plotted points on a map.

We built this project on ASP.net, CSS and Java Script. We used SQL server as the database. In order to show the members plotted on a map, we implemented the Google maps API. Each member address included a longitude and latitude value in the database using geocodes.

Our team built a procedure that pulled the data from the SQL server by name or the address and radius. The application has the capability to locate members all over the world.  The ASP.net application is hosted on a local server and inherited by the custom Web part of SharePoint MOSS 2007. We used a variety of software to complete this application, all of which you will find listed below:

• Visual studio 2008
• SQL Server 2005
• MOSS 2007 Windows server 2008
• ASP.Net (C#)
• Java Script
• CSS
• Google Maps API